Japanese submarine option odds-on favourite

Hugh White

There is no overriding need to build our new submarines in Australia, but there are very good reasons not to buy them from Japan. So Bill Shorten is wrong to insist that the work must be done in South Australia at any cost. And Tony Abbott is just as wrong to be rushing to buy Japan's Soryu-class boats. So neither side of politics is approaching this immensely important decision sensibly. No wonder Australia's defence is such a mess.

Building defence equipment locally makes no strategic sense, if it raises the costs and risks of the project appreciably - and it often does, as the much-troubled Air Warfare Destroyer project reminds us. The usual counter-argument, that equipment cannot be maintained here unless it is built, here holds no water. We maintain the vast amount of defence equipment that is sourced overseas perfectly well.

Under the sea: Just where the new submarines for Australia should be built is a contentious issue.

Nonetheless, it is always tempting for governments to spend the defence budget on high-profile projects that make no sense strategically, but make perfect sense electorally. That is exactly what successive governments have done with the naval shipbuilding projects in South Australia over the past decade. And that is what Bill Shorten wants to keep doing.

So Abbott deserves credit for insisting that his government will decide where defence equipment is built, solely on the basis of what delivers the best capability at the best price. And his willingness to lose votes in South Australia in order to get best value for the defence dollar looks commendable.

Let's wait and see, though. Mr Abbott may simply swap one barrel of pork for another, by fast-tracking another huge project to build more warships in South Australia. That would be a big mistake because Australia does not need these ships, and even if we did it might be much better to buy them, too, overseas.

Meanwhile, Mr Abbott still faces a choice about where the subs should be built if not in South Australia. It now seems likely that he will decide to buy them from Japan. There are many good reasons to regard such a decision as a serious mistake, but Mr Shorten's thinly-veiled xenophobia is certainly not one of them. His ill-considered remarks last week confirm that he does not yet show the qualities of national leadership on such issues.

Advertisement

But Mr Abbott's headlong rush into a decision to buy from Japan is just as irresponsible. To see why we need to look both at the submarines themselves and at the wider strategic context. The Soryu-class submarine has a good reputation and it has the clear advantage of being much bigger, and therefore longer-range, than other boats on the international market. But it is not clear that the Soryu's size actually translates into longer range, and range, though important, is only one factor among many to be considered.

Moreover it would be rash to assume that the Soryu would be a low-risk, off-the-shelf buy. For a start, we would want to fit a quite different combat system to the boat, introducing lots of technical problems to be solved.

Above all, we know very little about these submarines, nor about the companies that build them. Japan has never sold a submarine overseas before and the Japanese Navy must be uneasy about sharing their secrets with others, making the project potentially very hard to manage. The boats themselves have not been systematically compared with the other options, and may well end up performing much worse, and costing much more, than the government seems to assume.

And in the end the qualities of the boats themselves are almost certainly secondary to the real driver of the Abbott government's enthusiasm for the Japanese option, which has much more to do with international politics than with submarine capability. For Mr Abbott, the real attraction of a Japanese submarine deal is the way it would further deepen and consolidate the de facto strategic alliance with Japan, which remains the most significant international initiative of the Abbott government so far.

There are many reasons to doubt that this alliance is in Australia's interests, especially when it so clearly drags us into Japan's bitter disputes with China. A decision to buy Japanese submarines would draw the bonds with Japan tighter still, tying us much more closely to Japan strategically. And it would place the future of our submarine capability at the mercy, for decades to come, of future shifts in Japan's domestic politics and international relations.

The last of a new class of Japanese-built submarines might not even be delivered until 2035 or 2040. How sure can we be that within that time Japan will no longer be a US ally? That it will not have restored its long-standing ban on defence exports? That it will not have become a compliant neighbour of a predominant China, or on the other hand have become China's bitter enemy? What would happen to our new submarine capability in any of these contingencies?

Mr Abbott may simply swap one barrel of pork for another.

Hugh White

This is the essential reason why the Japanese submarine idea is so ill-judged. Buying our submarines from Japan at a time when Japan's own strategic future is so uncertain, imposes an immense element of risk for the future of one of our most critical military capabilities.

And there are several perfectly good alternatives. Some of them would even allow us to build our new submarines in South Australia, in a way that did not sacrifice our defence needs. The Abbott government has not yet seriously considered them.

Hugh White is an Age columnist and professor of strategic studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU.